This week, I’m sharing a reflection on the three waves crashing down upon us—all at once. On our minds. On our economies. On our nations.
Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians told the Epic of Gilgamesh. The gods, irritated by the constant clamor of a humanity that had grown too numerous and noisy, decided to send a flood. One man, Uta-napishtim, warned by a compassionate god, built an ark to survive the disaster. The myth of Noah, as you’ve probably guessed, is a retelling of the Gilgamesh story. Every era has had its flood. Ours is technological.
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We’ve entered the age of total overflow. Three waves are rising—together.
- The first crashes into our minds: cognitive overload.
- The second sweeps across our jobs: automation threatens every profession.
- The third shakes the foundations of nations: technological dependence reveals our geopolitical vulnerabilities.
Acceleration is dizzying. We’re swimming faster, but the water is rising faster still.
Why does this flood metaphor resonate so deeply? Because it taps into a primal fear: the fear of losing our footing, of seeing our bearings swept away, of becoming obsolete overnight. What’s different from past revolutions? The speed and the scale. The steam engine took a century to reshape the world. Electricity took half a century. The internet, 25 years. AI is doing it in less than a decade.
Your brain underwater
Every morning, you open your eyes—and the submersion begins. Your phone already shows 47 notifications, sorted by an AI deciding what deserves your attention. Your inbox overflows—with messages increasingly generated by AI, automated follow-ups, and newsletters personalized by algorithms. Before your first coffee, you’ve already interacted with more AIs than humans.
AI hasn’t just accelerated the flow of information. It has multiplied it. Every tool now generates 10 times more content than before. Emails take 30 seconds to write. Reports are generated in 2 minutes. The result? What once took a day now takes an hour. So we produce 10 times more.
The symptoms are everywhere. The average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today. But it’s not just the quantity drowning us—it’s the quality. Every piece of AI-generated content is optimized to capture your attention, fine-tuned to maximize engagement. Algorithms have mastered the art of triggering your dopamine.
Multitasking is no longer a choice. It’s mandatory in the face of AI's generative speed. As you reply to one email, three more arrive. As you read one report, two more are generated. We think we’re augmented. We’re just overwhelmed.
This cognitive saturation is the direct result of acceleration. The more capable AI becomes, the more it produces. The more it produces, the more we must process. The more we process, the less we can actually think.
We’re connected to everything, but present to nothing. And we call that progress.
Your job swept away by automation
While our brains overflow, another wave is forming. Automation—once confined to assembly lines—is invading offices, law firms, and boardrooms.
The list of AI agents grows weekly—a litany of change. Manus, Delos, Runner H, N8N, ChatGPT-5 with its estimated IQ between 140 and 150—these tools perform tasks better than top-tier graduates and automate increasingly complex business processes. No code needed—just natural language conversation with these AIs.
I had a chilling experience recently. During a video sales meeting, I realized the person I was speaking with was reading arguments generated in real-time by an AI behind their camera. I, too, was taking notes using another AI. We had become mere spectators—or at best, voice actors—for artificial agents analyzing our exchange and, very likely, soon capable of replacing us entirely. What remained of the human element? A few signs, nonverbal expressions, an unconscious connection—still, for now, decisive in the decision-making process. In this case, a buying decision. Fascinating. Terrifying.
Today, AI plays the role that digital technology did in the 2000s—but in fast-forward. What took 20 years will now take 5 to 10 years at most. AI doesn’t replace your job. It makes it obsolete.
Failing to adapt means choosing to disappear.
When nations lose control
The third wave operates on a scale beyond our grasp. It began in the ‘90s as a trickle—some offshored factories. It grew into a river in the 2000s—entire sectors moved to Asia. Today, it’s a tsunami swallowing national technological sovereignty. Beyond AI, it’s the very foundation of our digital infrastructure that’s built elsewhere.
This week, I discovered Patrick McGee’s book Apple in China. McGee tells the story of Apple’s evolution in China... a perfect illustration of rising tides. At first, a few thousand trained workers. Then tens of thousands. Then millions. Today: 28 million Chinese workers trained by Apple—more than the entire Californian workforce. Trained to do what? Design and produce cheap competing products. In 2010, Apple still controlled its supply chain. By 2020, 90% of production depended on China. And tomorrow?
But this isn’t just about Apple. The pattern is everywhere. We offshored production. Then R&D. Then patents. Then control. Europe wakes up submerged: importing chips, screens, batteries. Its clouds and algorithms are American—for now. But soon, they may be Chinese, unless we act.
We built our own cage. And gilded it to make it more comfortable.
In the face of the flood, myths teach one lesson: the survivor is the one who saw it coming.
Protect your mind
The instinctive reaction to the wave is flight. Total disconnection. Back to candlelight. That’s a mistake. You don’t fight a tsunami by turning your back. You learn to surf.
First, build mental levees. Cognitive decompression zones. Screen-free moments. No notifications. Your brain needs these pauses to consolidate, sort, create. Neuroscience confirms it: boredom is the seedbed of creativity. Find it again.
Then, train smartly. Understand deeply what’s happening. Prompting an AI will soon be as fundamental as reading. Prompt engineering is a new form of literacy.
Finally, AI forces us to become irreplaceably human.
We must systematically cultivate what machines will never do in our place:
Deep empathy—not the simulated kind.
The capacity to make and own tough decisions.
Disarming humor.
Charisma and the ability to embody a powerful, authentic message facing an audience.
These are your assets. Develop them.
Transform your company
Companies facing AI resemble dinosaurs facing the meteor. Some are staring at the sky, wondering where that light is coming from. Others have already begun their evolution.
The organizations that will survive are those that rethink their DNA. I call it becoming a symbiotic enterprise. But the term doesn’t matter. Let’s just say: a smart fusion between human capabilities and machine power.
In my work with companies, I repeat this message: put AI at the heart of your model, and you give yourself every chance to thrive.
Three pillars for this transformation:
- First pillar: Train massively. But remember—AI is culture. Turn every employee into an AI pilot.
- Second pillar: Use your data. Companies spend years trying to structure data perfectly, hoping to use it "someday." That day never comes. Modern AI digests chaos. It finds patterns in messiness. Start letting AI analyze your data now.
- Third pillar: Document your processes for transposition. Every business expertise can become an intelligent agent—but first, it must be captured. Your best experts have 30 years of experience in their heads. You have five years to encode that into AI.
The manager's role will change radically. No longer task distributors. They’ll become sherpas of continuous transformation. Their mission: identify what can be automated, protect what must remain human, and orchestrate collaboration between the two.
Let’s cultivate new leaders
The urgency is absolute. Every lost day widens the gap. We need mobilization at every level.
Families must teach digital literacy as we once taught reading.
Companies must become drivers of their transformation.
Communities, towns, city halls must launch programs.
European nations must unite—beyond national ego.
For this, we need new leaders. And they exist. They are our modern Uta-napishtim.
Symbiosis as the path forward
Here we are, in the trough of the wave. The technological flood is a certainty. The only questions left:
How high will it rise? How fast will it hit? And most importantly—what will we do about it?
History teaches us: civilizations don’t die from too many problems. They die from too few solutions. Rome didn’t fall because the barbarians were too strong—but because the Romans had stopped inventing.
Today, we still have a choice. We can suffer the flood as victims. Or we can learn to navigate these new waters. AI is a paradigm shift. It forces us to redefine what it means to be human, to work, to create, to decide, to live together.
This transformation won’t be easy or painless.
Jobs will disappear.
Skills will become obsolete.
Certainties will crumble.
But that’s the price of any rebirth. The caterpillar must dissolve inside the chrysalis to become a butterfly.
The good news? There’s still time.
As long as we start now.
Let’s not try to build dams to stop the tsunami. It’s impossible—and pointless.
Let’s learn to breathe underwater.
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